Enlightenment
by Empatheia
Summary: [Nekozawa x Haruhi] It takes twenty eight days to break a habit.


**A/N: **Written for the March round of flashfics on LiveJournal, for **Girldisturbed13**.

...I like this fic. Hee.

**xoxoxoxox**

_**Enlightenment**_

**xoxoxoxox**

Despite Haruhi's best efforts to the contrary, it was a dark and stormy night.

It was of course midday and the sky was serenely blue as usual, but that was Nekozawa Umehito for you.

"I can't," he whispered in deep horror, clutching Beelzenef and his voluminous black cloak closer to his chest. "It's impossible, just leave me alone!"

Haruhi sighed and summoned all the patience at her disposal-- a considerable amount, but she was beginning to think she was totally and irreversibly overmatched when pitted against this level of stubborness. He'd _asked_ her to help him with this, but that didn't seem to stop him from resisting every step of the way. "Think of Kirimi-chan," she ordered firmly, remorselessly targetting his weak point.

He froze for a long moment, then slumped defeatedly.

The graduation ceremony for his class was one month from now. His beloved little sister, whom he powerfully adored and would do almost anything for, refused to come unless he came as himself.

...Without his props.

No cloak, no wig, no Beelzenef. Just the golden self he hid beneath them.

He had come to Haruhi the day before and begged her (while cramped into a tiny, suspicious-smelling broom closet no less) to help him overcome his terror of the light. He'd seen how even the usually more taciturn members of the Host Club seemed more relaxed and happy while around her, and had (probably correctly) assumed that she would be able to help him as well.

That did not mean he planned to make it easy for her.

She had been attempting to cajol him out of the cloak for nearly an hour now, and the most progress she'd made was to make him take down the hood to reveal the black wig beneath. It was pathetic and she felt the frustration simmering just under the top layer of her skin, like an itch that hadn't quite come up yet. A potential itch. Or something.

"Cloak. Off. _Now," _she told him in no uncertain terms.

Nekozawa Umehito glared at her sulkily from behind fake inky bangs and mutely refused. His resolve, whenever she managed to galvanize him, lasted for less than a minute before his terror won out all over again. "No! I can't. I _can't_."

Haruhi gave up. Looking around the deserted room just to make sure no one had snuck in while she was distracted, she took a deep breath and faced him directly. She would give him five more seconds to take the cloak off.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The cloak hadn't moved an inch from its comfortable perch on Nekozawa's angular shoulders.

And that was _just about enough_ for Haruhi. Without the slightest hint of warning, she shifted on her feet and lunged for him, catching the cloak in one hand and slipping around behind him to pull it off. For a few glorious seconds, it seemed she would be successful-- her hand caught perfectly in the cloak and she slipped around behind him to pull it off...

...then it all went to buggery. There was a clasp. Her sharp tug on the fabric added to her forward momentum accomplished nothing towards getting the cloak off, but it did very well indeed at getting her crushed beneath a suddenly imbalanced Nekozawa on the hard wooden floor. Her cheek impacted the boards with a painful slap, followed a split second later by an elbow or two into her back and a stunningly heavy body thudding down onto her and knocking the breath out of her.

Haruhi wheezed.

Nekozawa, stunned for a moment by her sudden attack, finally cottoned on to what was happening and rolled off her with a string of half-coherent apologies she didn't bother listening to.

Fujioka Haruhi had finally run completely out of patience.

The moment she regained her breath (some two minutes later, after her face had turned faintly blue) she stood with her fists tight at her sides and her eyes narrowed. "That is _it_," she said, deadly quiet. "Take the cloak off, senpai, or I'll light it on fire. If it's still on you when I do, well then, that's _your_ problem."

He stared at her with wide, startlingly beautiful blue eyes. Most people thought his eyes were black-- that was only because he made a point of either not showing them or hiding them so deeply in the shadows of his cowl it was basically impossible to think otherwise. He didn't have the cowl now, and the room was flooded with sunlight. Those eyes conveyed his total shock very well, almost well enough to call them 'expressive.'

He looked like a wounded rabbit.

"Now," she said flatly. Her back hurt like... well, like some bloody heavy idiot had fallen on it elbows-first. She was not impressed.

Nekozawa obviously knew when he was beaten. With the greatest reluctance possible, he drew the cloak off and folded it self-consciously into a bulky black bundle.

"Now the wig."

He cringed, but complied with that as well, handing the bundle off to her as though giving away his first-born child for adoption. There was a serious threat of tears in his eyes.

Now, he simply looked like a normal student, in a blue and black uniform like everyone else. His pale golden hair fell in silky wisps around his aristocratic face. His blue eyes swept the floor forlornly.

All right, so he didn't really look quite like a normal student. For one, he still desperately clutched Beelzenef in his faintly trembling arms. For two, he was a good sight prettier than most of the normal students. Easily as visually pleasing as Tamaki, if in a different, more fragile way.

He could have easily been wildly popular with the girls, if it hadn't been for his odd and crippling fear of all things bright and beautiful.

Except for his sister, which was why they were there.

"Good, senpai," Haruhi said approvingly. "I'm going to keep these. If you come to school tomorrow wearing new ones, I'll keep my promise. You've asked me for help, so I'm going to help you. It would be nice if you would cooperate."

He nodded miserably. "Thank you, Haruhi-san," he whispered, then trudged out of the room with a veritable black fog of depression hovering around him.

She sighed. Perhaps tomorrow would go better.

xxxxxxx

It didn't.

"I'm melting!" he wailed, clawing his way into the hillside like a demented blond meerkat. "It's too bright! The sky is too big! I can't take it!"

Haruhi smiled serenely, having taken the time to fully recharge her patience the night before.

At least he hadn't come to school in a new cloak and cowl. To the stunned joy of the girls in his class, he'd arrived in all his silvery-golden glory in the morning, without a non-uniform bit of black in sight. Beelzenef was akwardly stuffed into his powder-blue school jacket, but the girls weren't looking there anyway.

It had taken Haruhi ten minutes and seven Glares of Death to get him away from their fangirly clutches, and from there she'd dragged him straight outside to a small hill in the garden to soak up some real sunlight for possibly the first time in his entire life.

He'd only tried to run once, after which Haruhi had managed to trip him and sit on his vainly writhing back. There was still perched, smiling beatifically at the late afternoon sun and waiting for him to stop struggling.

"It burns!" he cried, cowering as best as he could behind his thin sleeves. "It hates me, I can feel it. It wants to turn me into ashes. My skin is melting."

"Drama queen," she muttered under her breath, and didn't budge an inch.

It took nearly an hour for him to calm down, at which point he probably was actually a bit sunburned. It was worth it, however, because he had actually noticed that flowers were pretty, and that it felt sort of nice to be warm without dragging around eighteen pounds of heavy cloak.

Great progress, in Haruhi's opinion. She let him up, smiled at him, and let him race for the safety of the shadows. He wouldn't notice Beelzenef missing until she was already long gone.

Tomorrow would be better.

xxxxxxxxx

It was't, nor was the day after that, but after a week it did indeed get better.

He came to school every day absent his cloak, and woefully also missing the the lumpy bulge of Beelzenef under his jacket. Haruhi had that tidily locked up at her apartment, which she was fairly certain he did not know the location of.

After school and the obligatory extraction from the fangirls, she would drag him back to the hill and sit with him for at least an hour, at first on him, then beside him when he finally capitulated and agreed not to run.

Now, he merely sat on his haunches with his arms tight around his knees and stared around at the cheerfully colourful landscape around him like someone being hunted by something very unpleasant and sneaky.

In an effort to distract him from the utter horror of the sun overhead, Haruhi talked to him.

Eventually, it became a conversation of sorts, if a rather limp and uninspiring one.

Then it became a halfway tolerable conversation.

Then she stopped having to chase him and drag him to the hill-- he went on his own, with hardly a murmur of protest. A welcome change to be sure.

However, it wasn't until the three week mark that he was finally pleasant to be around. By then, she almost looked forward to his daily dosage of resistance-building sunlight-sitting, because once he allowed himself to be distracted from his obsession, he was really very intelligent and a decent conversationalist.

He was an avid reader, and he'd read many of the same things she had. They passed many hours earnestly debating the merits of truly heroic protagonists versus flawed ones, and the virtue of setting in advancing the plot in one of their mutual favourites. They argued fiercely over the strange attraction some antagonists had over readers, and why in some stories the reader ended up cheering for the antagonist's victory despite the clear impossibility of it.

Sometimes, as time went on, he would actually miss the end of the hour and end up staying and talking with her well into the twilight. He didn't notice the change within himself as the sun lost its terror for him, but Haruhi noticed and had a secret smile on her face nearly all the time now.

The day before the ceremony, he brought an odd lumpy basket to the hill after classes were done. Upon her asking what was in it, he proudly revealed what was clearly a home-made dinner. It looked less than wonderful, but the thought that he would rather sit on the hill in the sun and have dinner with her than race back to his shadowy room at home made her inordinately proud of him.

The fact that he'd taken the effort to actually cook for her with his own hands made a little flutter of warmth stir in her stomach that she uneasily decided to ignore.

It tasted more than decent despite its unpromising appearance. He was, despite all expectations, a passable cook. Wonders would never cease.

When the sun set, they were still talking, but only casually whenever something occurred to one of them that wanted saying. If nothing did, they were comfortably silent and just sat next to each other and watched the glow fade from the sky to reveal the glassy-brilliant scattering of stars.

"Do stars frighten you too?" she asked curiously.

He thought about that for a moment, because after all stars were nothing but more suns, just a long way further off. "No," he answered truthfully. "The sun is right there, and it always feels as though it's looking straight at me... and not... not liking what is sees overmuch," he finished in a whisper. "The stars are all right, they don't seem to care one way or another how I am. They don't mind if I'm not perfect. The sun tries to show everyone how ugly I am by lighting me up all over. The stars just leave me be."

It was the most he'd ever said about his phobia. Haruhi had gathered as much from spending hours a day with him trying to overcome it, but it still hurt a bit to hear him admit out loud that he was afraid of being seen because he feared judgement. It was mostly baseless, she knew, as the last few weeks had proven. He was a fine human being, maybe even a bit more than fine, and certainly would not be judged any more harshly than anyone else was.

There was more to it than that. Haruhi realized she was very curious as to what the rest was. What had made him crave the shadows (and the concealment they brought) like he did? What unkind word had made him curl in on himself for protection? Whose critical eye had wounded his trust?

She wanted to know, and she wanted to fix it. If he'd allow it.

Instead of replying to his hesitant confession, she just smiled a little bit and leaned sideways until her shoulder rested against his arm, offering silent support with her presence.

He was a little surprised, but glad of it, judging by the way he leaned back into her.

xxxxx

The day of the ceremony came.

Nekozawa Umehito walked calmly up the aisle in his graduation attire, his sun-pale hair brushed until it shone and his blue eyes focused straight ahead.

When he passed his astonished sister sitting slackjawed and golden amid the rows of black hair and olive skin, he turned a radiant smile on her and flashed her a small, discreet wink.

A tear spilled from the corner of each of her eyes.

Haruhi noticed, and fought tears of her own. She'd hardly noticed how far he'd come, since she'd been with him every day, but it was evident now in the way that people who had not seen him in a while were reacting to him-- astonishment, yes, and joy. She clutched the enormous bundle of black fabric she carried to her chest and missed the rest of his short ritual because she couldn't quite see through her blurry eyes.

Next thing she knew, he was standing in front of her. He caught her by the arm and firmly escorted her out of the room. Nobody noticed except for Kirimi, but she was exceptionally bright for such a young child and did not try to follow just yet.

Nekozawa found an empty classroom and pulled Haruhi into it before whirling to face her with an enormous smile on his face.

"Did you see?" he said joyfully. "She came, and I wasn't afraid! You saw, right?"

Haruhi awkwardly wiped her eyes with her elbow and pushed out the bundle to him. "I saw. You were wonderful. As a reward, you can have these back now if you want."

Nekozawa eyed the bundle, then took it gently from her and set it on a nearby table. "Haruhi-san," he said more quietly. "I don't know how to thank you for this."

She shrugged. "How about going to classes once in a while-- once you get into university, that is-- without the getup? That would make me happy."

He looked mutely frustrated. "It doesn't seem like enough. I've been afraid of the light since as long as I can remember. You made it go away in just a month."

"You did all the work," she interrupted uncomfortably.

"You made me do it. I really wish there was something I could do."

She smiled at him then, and shook her head. "It's honestly all right. You don't have to do anything. I helped you because I wanted to, and I had fun. Please, it's all right."

Nekozawa met her eyes, then took a deep, calming breath and closed the short gap between them just long enough to press a chaste, heartfelt kiss on her startled lips. "Thank you very much for all your help," he said formally, then squeezed her hand once before walking away.

She watched him go in silent shock. Her hands drifted up on her own to let her fingers touch her lips unconsciously, sealing the memory in.

The bruises from when he'd landed on her the first time she tried to take the cloak away were finally gone, and she rather thought they weren't the only bruises that had vanished recently.

It wasn't until she got home that she realized he had never asked for Beelzenef back. It was still locked in her room, and she wondered if he meant her to keep it for him. If so, she didn't mind at all.

xxxxxxxxxx

It was dark and stormy night that night, but an honest one. Nekozawa Umehito had absolutely nothing to do with it.

**XoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoX**

**A/N: **Hee, they're so _cute!_


End file.
